The Mystery of Mercy Close (28 page)

Words reached me on the cold, still night. Disembodied people were having a conversation about me.

‘… out there in the water. Look!’

A man’s voice. ‘I have a torch.’

A dog woofed and a beam of light cut across the water and landed on my head. For the love of God! Could they just not leave a person in peace to try to kill herself!

‘Are you okay?’ The man with the torch sounded alarmed.

‘I’m just swimming,’ I called, with as much authority as I could muster. ‘Leave me alone. Walk your dog.’

A second man spoke. ‘She’s not swimming. She’s trying to kill herself.’

‘Is she?’

‘It’s dark, it’s freezing, and she’s got all her clothes on. She’s trying to kill herself.’

‘We’d better get her out, so.’

The next thing the two men and – the ultimate humiliation – their fecking dogs were bounding down the steps and
swimming out to me. When they reached me one of the men slipped the rucksack off my back and let it sink to the sea floor.

‘Leave me alone,’ I said, almost in tears. ‘Mind your own business.’

But together they pushed and floated me back to the steps, the dogs gasping and panting and forming a happy little flotilla around me.

The woman who had spotted me, who had kick-started the whole rescue mission, helped me up the last few steps. ‘What could be so bad?’ she asked, her face a picture of concern. ‘That you would do something like this?’

I have always found dog-lovers to be irritatingly devoid of imagination.

‘We should ring the police,’ one of the men said.

‘Why?’ I said. I was crying now, crying my eyes out. I wasn’t dead. I was still alive and I’d been so looking forward to being dead. ‘It’s not a crime to attempt suicide.’

‘So you
were
trying to kill yourself!’

‘We should ring for an ambulance,’ the woman said.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Just wet and cold.’

‘Not that sort of ambulance.’

‘You mean the men-in-white-coats sort of ambulance?’

‘Well, yes …’

‘She’s freezing,’ one of the men said. ‘Drenched and freezing. And come to think of it, so am I.’

These poor people – they’d saved my life and now they weren’t sure what to do with me.

‘I’ve a blanket in the car,’ the woman said.

‘Might as well head back,’ one of the men said. ‘We won’t achieve much by standing here.’

Off we set, three of the four of us dripping wet. It took us about twenty minutes to cover the mile back and we were an awkward little band. From what I could gather, none of the others knew each other; they’d just been out for a peaceful
late-night walk with their dogs when they’d happened upon me trying to top myself, and now they were obliged to make conversation with total strangers. The dogs, however, were having a great time: new friends, an impromptu swim – life didn’t get much better.

‘Do you have a home?’ the woman asked me. ‘Is there someone I can ring for you?’

‘No, no, I’m grand.’ Tears were still pouring down my face.

‘Maybe you could ring the Samaritans?’

‘Maybe I could.’ I pitied the Samaritans. I’m sure they wanted to hang up every time they realized it was me on again.

‘Did you lose your job or something?’ one of the men asked.

‘No.’

‘Did your boyfriend run off with another girl?’ the other man asked.

‘No.’

‘Have you thought about the people you’d have left behind?’ the woman asked, suddenly sounding angry. ‘Your parents? Your friends? Why don’t you think about their feelings? How they’d have felt if the tide hadn’t been out and we hadn’t been here?’

I looked at her tearfully. ‘I’ve depression,’ I said. ‘I’m
sick
. I’m not doing this for the laugh.’

Talk about adding insult to injury! Like, if someone gets lupus or cancer, they don’t have to put up with people accusing them of being selfish.

‘Well, it sounds to me,’ one of the men said, ‘that you need to go into someplace for a rest.’

Three months it had taken me, roughly three months, from my very first visit to Dr Waterbury, when I’d mocked his prescription for antidepressants, to me trying to drown myself.

Within a week of first seeing him, not only had I got the drugs, but I was back in his office, begging for a higher dose and desperate to know when they’d start working.

The descent into hell had begun about three or four days after his diagnosis. I hadn’t been feeling too sunny anyway but the trajectory was suddenly a lot steeper. Maybe because he’d put a label on it.

I began to feel like I was splitting apart.

Huge chunks of anxiety began to break free inside me and rise to the surface, like an iceberg calving. Everything looked ugly and pointy and strange, and it was like I was living in a science fiction film. As if I’d crash-landed into a body that was similar to mine, and on to a planet that was similar to earth, but everything was malign and sinister. It seemed like all the people around me had been replaced with doppelgängers. I felt very, very not safe. Uneasy was the most accurate description of how I felt, uneasy to the power of a million.

All day long my stomach would buzz with bees and broken glass and I couldn’t eat a thing, then late at night a voracious hunger would come over me and I’d devour biscuits, crisps and bowl after bowl of cereal.

I started taking the tablets, but within days I was back with Dr Waterbury, looking for a higher dose, and he – kindly, but firmly – told me it would take three weeks before they started working, so not to be expecting any miracles.

‘Oh God, don’t tell me that.’ I wept and writhed in front of him. ‘I need something to help me and I need some sleep. Please give me sleeping tablets.’

He reluctantly gave me ten Stilnoct and warned me till he was blue in the face that they were highly addictive, that if I got too fond of them I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

‘But I can’t sleep anyway!’ I said.

‘Did something happen to you?’ he asked. ‘To trigger this … state of mind you’re in?’

‘No.’ There had been nothing, no trauma, recent or past. No relationship break-up. No one close to me had died. I hadn’t been mugged or burgled or anything. The whole thing had just come out of a clear blue sky.

I wished there had been something. Because if I didn’t know what was wrong with me, how could I get fixed and be normal again?

‘Have you ever felt like this before?’ he asked.

‘No.’ I did a quick scan of my life. ‘Well, actually, maybe … A few times. But not as bad. Nothing like as bad. And the bouts didn’t last long, so I didn’t really notice, if you know what I mean.’

He nodded. ‘Depression is episodic.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that if it happens once, it tends to recur.’

I stared at him. ‘Is that meant to make me feel better?’

‘It’s just information.’

I went home and waited for the three weeks to pass, and while I was waiting I spent hours and hours on the internet, Googling depression, and it alarmed me to discover that my symptoms didn’t entirely fit. With classic depression, as far as I could see, it slows you down and seizes you up so you can’t do anything. I read a blog from one poor woman who had been lying in bed needing to do a wee, and it took her sixty-seven hours before she could drag herself from under the covers and into the bathroom.

It wasn’t like that for me. I was really agitated, I needed to have things to do, I had to keep moving. Not that I was able to accomplish anything because my concentration was utterly destroyed. I couldn’t read anything, not even magazines. If it hadn’t been for DVD box-sets, I don’t know what I would have done.

I didn’t deliberately decide to stop answering emails, it was just that it would have been easier to climb Mount Everest than construct a sentence. And I didn’t make a hard-and-fast decision to never answer my phone. I fully intended to do it later or tomorrow, just as soon as I’d remembered how to speak like a normal person. It wasn’t that I took sick leave from my job; it was nothing as dramatic as that. But sick leave took me. Somehow I’d managed to offload the few cases I’d been working on and I just slid into a place where I didn’t have any current work, and it was a situation that I was determined was merely temporary, but temporary began to go on for a while.

People rang to offer me new cases but I couldn’t talk to them and I couldn’t call them back and after a few days it had got too late and I knew they’d have decided to use someone else.

I watched an awful lot of television, particularly the news, which I’d never bothered much with before. I was deeply affected by any bad stuff – natural disasters, terrorist outrages – but not in the right way. They made me hopeful.

On the internet depression forums, I could see that everyone else was really distressed by catastrophic events, but they perked me up. My reasoning was that if there was an earthquake in some other country, maybe there could be an earthquake in Ireland, preferably right beneath my feet. I didn’t wish ill on anyone else – I wanted everyone else to live and flourish in happiness – but I wanted to die.

I knew my state of mind wasn’t right, that it was really skewed and wrong and counter-intuitive. It was basic human
instinct to try to shield yourself from danger, but instead I wanted to embrace it. Indeed, the only reason I left my flat was in the hope that something terrible would happen to me; despite all those statistics about more accidents happening in the home than anywhere else, I still thought I stood a better chance of being killed while out in the world.

My pills were my most precious commodities. I carried them in my jeans pockets and sometimes I took them out to look at, to fix them with a look of faith. I kept waiting for another eleven o’clock to roll around, so I could take my next antidepressant and move one day nearer to being cured.

Prize of prizes were my sleeping tablets. The day that Dr Waterbury gave in and wrote the prescription I actually cried with relief – well, I think it was relief, but at that point I was crying around the clock so it was hard to be sure – and that night I was able to approach bedtime without the usual dread and four episodes of
Curb Your Enthusiasm
.

In one way, the pill worked – I got knocked out for seven hours – but I woke up with the strange suspicion that I’d been abducted by aliens while I’d slept. Gingerly, I felt my bum. Had I been experimented on? Had I been subjected to the much-famed anal probe?

Chemically induced sleep was better than endless hours of horror-filled wakefulness, but the tablets gave me terrible, vivid, elaborate dreams. Even when I was unconscious I didn’t feel safe. I felt as if I spent each night hurtling up and down roller coasters, while ugly people yelled abuse at me. And every morning I bumped roughly into the world, feeling like I’d travelled a long and gruelling way while I’d been absent from myself.

However, horrible and all as those early days were, there was an innocence to them because at that stage I still had faith that medication could fix me. If I could just hang on for the requisite three weeks, I told myself, the tablets would
kick in and I’d be okay. But the three weeks came and went and I felt worse. More frightened, less able to function.

Sometimes, late at night, I got in my car and drove for hours, but twice I burst my front left car tyre because I hit the pavement by mistake. I, who had always been so proud of my driving, was officially a menace on the roads.

I went back to Dr Waterbury and because I’d been spending so much time online I knew more about antidepressants than he did. I could have given you chapter and verse on every pill on the market, all the different families – the tricyclics, the SNRIs, SSRIs, MAOIs.

I proposed that he prescribe a lesser-known tricyclic, one that my internet research indicated might help with my specific symptoms. He had to look it up in a book and he seemed alarmed.

‘The side effects of this one are pretty hefty,’ he said. ‘Rash, delirium, possible
hepatitis
–’

‘Yes, yes,’ I agreed. ‘Tinnitus, seizures, can trigger schizophrenia. Really, it’s grand. It doesn’t matter, so long as it works and I stop thinking I’m in a science fiction film.’

‘It really isn’t prescribed much,’ he said. ‘I’ve certainly never prescribed it. How about we try you on Cymbalta? A lot of my patients have had good results with that.’

‘I read about the other one on the internet –’

He muttered something that might have been ‘Bloody internet’.

‘– and a woman on a blog had the same feeling that I do, that she was awake in a nightmare, and the tablets helped.’

He shook his head. ‘Let’s go with the Cymbalta, it’s safer.’

‘If I say yes, will you give me a prescription for more sleeping pills?’

He waited, then said, ‘If you agree to start seeing a counsellor.’

‘Done.’

‘Okay.’

‘Will the Cymbalta take three weeks before it works?’

‘I’m afraid so.’ He wrote some names on a piece of paper. ‘A couple of counsellors I’d recommend.’

I barely glanced at them; I was interested only in the tablets. I took the prescription from him. ‘Three weeks, you say, and then I’ll be okay.’

‘Well …’

But the three weeks passed and I had to go back to him again.

‘I’m worse,’ I said.

‘Did you ring any of those counsellors?’

‘Yes! Yes, of course I did.’ I would have done anything if I’d thought it might help. ‘I went to see one. Antonia Kelly. She’s nice, you know. Sympathetic.’ And she had a lovely car, an Audi TT – black, naturally. I was prepared to put my faith in a woman who had such good taste in cars. ‘I’m going to see her every Tuesday. We’ve agreed. But it’ll take ages; counselling takes
ages
to work. She told me. Months. Especially because I had a happy childhood.’ Wild-eyed I stared at him. ‘We’ve fuck all to work with!’

‘Surely you must have had some trauma …?’

‘No! I didn’t! I fecking wish I had!’ I forced myself to calm down a little. ‘I promise you, Dr Waterbury, I promise you I’ll work on my issues, even though I don’t have any. And even though I hate the word. But I need something in the short term. Can I have different tablets? Please, can I have the ones I told you about?’